Novel Creatures by Hilary Thompson

Author:Hilary Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

He significantly loses a faculty that for Martin Heidegger would be crucially human and key to the world Heidegger believes humans alone fully have—the ability to recognize beings as such. Just as Heidegger says of bees and blossoms that the bee “does not know the stamens of these blossoms as stamens” (193), Walser, wandering toward a rhythmic sound that turns out to be a shaman drumming by a fire, is unable to “identify the drumming as drumming” (236). We will see this lack of “as suchness” repeatedly in reference to Walser’s memory loss (259, 263), but also in the Siberian forest-dwellers’ encounter with Western music (268). It is as though the railway disaster has primed Walser for a shamanic rendezvous. The Shaman, when Walser first meets him, is immersed in a spirit journey of his own and seems to have expected Walser. When he pisses his hallucinogenic-laced urine into a glass for Walser to drink, Walser’s personal history becomes a vibrant disarray of animals, foreign stages, and travel locales. Fascinated by Walser’s babbling and convinced he is an off-course shaman’s apprentice, the Shaman packs up his belongings and flings him over his shoulder, initiating Walser into an inverted world:

Upside-down Walser continued to upbraid the embroidered back of the Shaman’s ceremonial frock. The hallucinogenic urine put the sluggish motor in his skull into overdrive.

‘Oh!’ he declaimed to the oncoming Siberian dawn. ‘What a piece of work is man!’

(238)

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